What We Talk About When We Talk About Homicide Investigations
by unlikelyheroine
Summary: Sometime in S5. We join our heroines in the morgue, with a dead body on the slab in between them. Just an ordinary day at the office for Jane and Maura.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

One day, one very ordinary day at the station, dealing with what is, for once, a very straightforward case, something is different. No, Jane tells herself, when she thinks about it again. Not different. Nothing has really _changed_. It is the same as it has been for some time, perhaps since that very first day in that bloodbath of a family home, when Maura, this vision of style and beauty and poise at a crime scene, had appeared out of nowhere in a designer outfit and high heels to carry out a medical examination on those two tragic victims of Charles Hoyt's twisted and depraved legacy, and stepped right into Jane's life and into a position she had since never left. Dr Isles, all class and intelligence and charm, had fixed her with that gaze, noted at once Jane's injury, and leaned forward to reset her broken nose with a painful tweak, those elegant, delicate, talented fingers making sudden contact with Jane's face, twisting and healing in one sharp, shocking, and yet somehow gentle motion. A searing, almost nauseating, pain for a moment, there and then gone again, leaving a strange sensation behind. It was, in part, a warm, secure feeling: of having been healed, and fixed, by someone who knew exactly what she was doing. But something else was there too, and it was something Jane had barely dared to admit, even to herself, ever since she had first noted its presence. Because the presence was really an absence. An absence of - Jane would not have let herself even consciously _think_ that thought, let alone say it out loud.

Late at night, or early grey mornings when exhausted and yet so far from sleep, thinking about Maura, somehow, and still hesitating in naming why she would think of her friend so often and so meaningfully, telling herself that Casey was who she was really in love with, really _wanted_, really missed, because surely she couldn't have this... _Yearning... _for... Jane wants to smile, in spite of herself, terrified and elated all at the same time, because _yearning_ is so very definitely a Maura Isles sort of word, and it has somehow now, today, of all days, nestled itself comfortably in the front of the conscious part of her brain, a spiralling, now settling thought, a beautiful, delicate butterfly composed of impossible colours, that have finally stopped flitting and came into absolute focus, almost painfully sharp relief.

_You yearn for Maura. You want Maura to touch you. You have always wanted this, ever since the first time she did._

A warm feeling, somewhere in the gut. Lower? Higher? Perhaps there is a medical term for this strange, glowing, balance-threatening... whatever it was. Maura would certainly know.

What was Jane thinking? She was having... _thoughts? _about Maura? Touching her...? Those soft, talented hands –

Conscious thought is halted by a sudden vision that all at once sears across Jane's brain. A premonition? A fantasy? Jane feels herself redden.

_A vision of Maura, wrapped up in crisp white sheets, her honey blonde hair tangled around her shoulders, gently waking from a morning slumber, hazel eyes opening to sunlight crisscrossing the bed, Maura so languidly gorgeous, totally irresistible and perfect; so absolutely her. _

Jane swallows hard.

_You want her in your bed. You want to be in hers._

Jane is not gay. Never has been gay. Never ever even been with a woman. It is all very clear-cut, Jane has told herself, whenever the issue has come up, and it often has, random and not-so-random people are forever throwing out "dyke" or "lesbo", just because Jane finds trouser suits practical, knows the rules to various sports, excels in a male-dominated profession, can't seem to find the right guy and when she does, well, oops he is off to Afghanistan, leaving Jane behind to spend as much free time as possible with her best female friend... It really is just typical of people and their stereotypical attitudes to assume that a tough woman is a lesbian. But some people's minds just work that way.

Patrick Doyle Sr, for example, well, that old villain had only termed them a couple, had only called Jane Maura's girlfriend - Jane's mouth is dry again - within five seconds of meeting them, to goad them both. His viciousness was random and without foundation. Impossible that he had managed, upon such brief acquaintance, to alight on anything close to the truth. And Jane's mother, in all but suggesting the two of them go to couples therapy, or that she would like to have a doctor in the family, or even, astonishingly, musing aloud whilst Jane sat but a foot away, still recovering, "the candle or the clam...?" - that was simply her mother making her usual off-key remarks. Once or twice, it was true, Jane had felt a sudden terror grabbing like a fist in her stomach, that her mother was going to ask her _that _question (she didn't want, here, to count the candle or the clam incident), but Angela never quite did, and Jane had made sure, just in case her mother's _wild ideas_ had become _completely insane ideas,_ to point out to her mother that she and Maura were not a couple, weren't together, could not be compared to those in a relationship, except –

_A flash, again. Maura in the bed. Now rolled over on her back, sheets arranged haphazardly, smokey "come-to-bed" eyes. Jane obeying such eyes. Skin so soft and tender, a physician's healing hands tracing Jane's criss-crossing of stomach scars over and over, sliding her hands up around Jane's waist –_

All these years, Jane had told herself the reason she was single was a simple one. Like many successful women of her generation, she wanted a lot out of life and love and had just never quite met the right guy. It wasn't so strange. Maura hadn't met the right guy yet either, after all. The fact that Jane had found herself wanting to spend all her free time with Maura, a new best friend - someone she had met and got along with instantly - that was just two women connecting because they understood where each other was coming from, despite their apparently outward differences. Jane was a cop, didn't know how to be anything else, wouldn't have ever tried. Maura was a doctor, but also a medical examiner, and also, in recent years, something of an unorthodox criminal investigator, throwing herself into police work and all it entailed with enthusiasm. She was well-educated, sophisticated. Knew about wine and books, had had a classical education. Maura's life fascinated Jane, even as she openly mocked it from time to time when Maura quoted Greek or Latin and corrected Jane if she had mistaken one for the other. Jane knew that Maura knew that Jane knew more than she let on, but Maura still knew more: about everything. The woman was fascinating, infuriating, intoxicating, gorgeous – she _was_ everything_. _

Jane closes her eyes. Surely she couldn't want... _Want..._ Why today, on this insignificant day? - why was today the day for her to start to be honest with herself about her feelings for her "best friend", the woman who had always been more, whose eyes and smile had reached deep down inside Jane and touched something she kept locked away out of fear? Today like so many other days that have gone before, Maura says something infuriating and precise and geeky and adorable and sexy (a gasp, somewhere, in Jane's brain. Maura is as sexy as hell) and funny and charming, and Jane wants to ask Maura if it is indeed medically possible for her heart to skip a beat, because it is undoubtedly the kind of thing that Maura would know, chapter and verse, and Jane could swear that hers just did.

"... in a reasonably advanced stage of decomposition, having been buried for between five and eight weeks in soil that has a limestone base."

Maura pauses in the examination and looks up at her friend, who is being uncharacteristically quiet this morning and, it must be said, looking slightly peaky. Jane is, Maura knows, not squeamish about dead bodies, and there is nothing about the corpse on the slab that Maura would have thought would especially upset Jane. An adult male, likely early thirties, possibly late twenties, dead from two or three heavy blows to the back of his head, none of which taken separately would have been fatal, but which together, contrived to kill him. Jane gets angry about women and children subjected to men's cruelty in particular, and Maura has seen her brush away a tear now and again for such victims that she has left pass unmentioned. But this body is, sorry deceased gentleman - fairly run of the mill.

Possibly it is man trouble again, Maura thinks. Jane has been waiting around for Colonel Casey Jones, Maura knows, despite her ill-advised entanglement with the somewhat odd Gabriel Dean in the interim. More out of boredom and loneliness than anything else, it seemed; Dean had been frankly below the standards Maura expected for Jane and there was something ever so slightly creepy about him. Casey was more up to the job, at least, but had gone very quiet of late. Maura's thoughts paused. Why was she thinking about Jane's love life now, in the middle of an examination? Jane was the closest friend Maura had ever had, and their lives now overlapped sufficiently that Maura thought of Jane's own mother as family. Although she doesn't think of Jane as a sister, Maura muses. Something else...?

"Maura."

Jane stands expectantly. It appears she has asked a question. Seeing Maura's uncharacteristic distraction, Jane unfolds and refolds her arms, and tries again. "You think he was murdered?"

"Think?"

Jane feels the corners of her mouth turn up slightly. Maura's infuriating, intoxicating need for precision.

"In your opinion as a medical examiner, was he murdered?"

"There's no way from the angle that he could have struck himself three times to cause these skull fractures - leaving aside the fact that any one of them very possibly would have rendered him unconscious - and the repetition suggests it was no accident."

"So he was murdered."

"I can't conclusively say."

"Fine, I'll say it."

_I want you_, Jane thinks, this the only "it" remaining in her mind as Maura bites her bottom lip endearingly and tries to avoid, Jane sees, a pout at Jane's connecting of dots that Maura would always rather leave unconnected until all the evidence is in.

"We can safely assume that… uh…" Jane pauses again, glances down at the back of her hand, back up. "It's a suspicious death."

_She's so distracted today, _thinks Maura. She nods. "I'm comfortable, for the purposes of your establishing facts for your investigation. with you saying you will treat it as a suspicious death."

_I want to kiss you, _Jane thinks. _That's the very next thing I want to do. The last words out of your mouth were "suspicious death." They were the last words out of my mouth too, but I don't care. I want to press my lips against yours. I am lost, to just standing here thinking about kissing you._

This is what Jane is thinking when her phone begins to ring with a special ringtone designated for someone in particular.


	2. Chapter 2

_"__Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them."_

_Thomas Gradgrind in "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens, 1854._

Jane's phone was ringing. Someone was calling her. Maura hoped it wasn't Casey. And then immediately decided that even in thinking that, she was not being a particularly good friend. _Fact._

Maura had built her entire life on a foundation of solid facts. She had chosen to focus on scientific subjects at school – not that she couldn't, if required, turn her hand to a history paper or an English essay and get As across the board, of course – but she preferred to deal in the known, rather than the speculative. That many scientific principles were in fact based on theories, and that the more she learned, the more she realised she didn't know, was something of a struggle for Maura to accept, but she consoled herself that it would all be worth it in the end as her ultimate goal appeared in sight on the horizon: qualifying as a doctor.

Such qualification Maura had achieved very successfully, with the highest grades, and ahead of most people's schedules. She could have had her pick of qualified medical positions, even if some of her reviews had noted with hesitation the lack of a perfect bedside manner… but Maura's clinical and diagnostic skills were simply too superlative to rule her out of the vast majority of positions for the little matter of what was sometimes termed a certain brusqueness, or lack of warmth. And so it was Maura herself who had decided that her destiny did not lie in attending to the living.

This was not, she assured herself, because living people were difficult, and talked back, and had opinions, and could vocally and actively express emotions such as disappointment or even gratitude. Yes, these were facts, but others were more pertinent. It was for more positive reasons, Maura determined, that she was drawn towards pathology. She was not, like some of her medical student contemporaries, scared, fazed or demoralized by the sight of a dead body. She had found anatomy, for example, fascinating. Maura wanted to work with the dead, she decided, so that she could give them a voice, to speak for those who could no longer say anything at all. And this she did by reference to the facts before her, and matters that could be meaningfully deduced from the evidence.

It was with such a principled devotion to the facts, that Maura would have to admit, in those unguarded moments where she happened to turn her laser-sharp perception onto her own feelings, certain undeniable, indisputable matters as pertaining to her own emotions. Simple facts, and nothing but the facts. That was Maura's way. And in applying this to one part of her life, Maura found herself applying it to all. In that spirit, if Maura were being entirely honest – and unless she wanted to break out in hives, Maura would, of course, need to be – there was the very simple fact, that she loved Detective Jane Clementine Rizzoli.

Yes, _loved._

That wasn't so shocking, was it? And surely not so secret. She had told Jane as much, over a glass of wine, more than once; on one occasion, even (of course, accurately) pointing out that her feelings for Jane were stronger and more potent than those for Jane's cute, naughty, sexy, and yet ultimately not-quite-Jane younger brother, Tommy. She had made the statement with a smile, and then, immediately following, a panic had grabbed in her guts that she hoped didn't show in her face; she wondered if Jane would take her admission the wrong way, which was to say the right way, which was to say the correct way, because Maura had compared her love for Jane to her strong liking for Tommy. That could sound, couldn't it, very much like a best friend that didn't want to unsettle a great platonic connection with another woman over that woman's brother. Or it could, perhaps, sound like something else entirely.

Wasn't English – which oddly enough, Maura noted, was one of those languages which had the largest vocabularies, both overall and in the active, everyday speech of the majority of its native speakers (all really very fascinating) – entirely unsatisfactory at times? One glaring example, of course, being its insufficient words for "love." There were so many words in English for hate. Detest, despise, loathe. Maura's personal favourite, _abhor_. But not so many words for the opposite emotion (of course, were they really opposites? Wasn't an absence of feeling really at the other end of the spectrum?)

Classical Greek, for example, was a vastly superior tongue on precisely this topic. What Maura felt for Jane, Maura was quite sure, was not just the meaningful bond between two frirends. That would be _philia. _The love of deep friendship between two personalities who very much understood each other. Certainly – there could be no doubt – Maura felt _philia _for Jane. Maura was fairly confident that this, at least, was reciprocated on Jane's part. Jane was definitely a friend that Maura could count on, and that in itself was a real beacon of light in Maura's life.

Greek, of course, had other words for love. _Agape _– essentially the love for other members of humanity generally, a sort of communal friendship. _Storge –_ more along the lines of the love and affection parents felt for their children and vice versa_. _Maura supposed her biological father, Paddy Doyle, in his own way, felt _storge_ for her. He had said he would kill for her, which, whilst she would rather she didn't take another human life in order to evidence his devotion, perhaps showed some kind of affection. Maura was not entirely sure what she felt in return for Paddy – more than nothing and somewhat less than any kind of _love_, seemed the best way to describe it. A sort of interested concern?

So yes. There were those kinds of love. And of course there was that other one, in the Greek formulation of such things.

_Eros_.

Jane was still on the phone, had in fact stepped out of the morgue to continue her conversation with whoever it was. It had been difficult to tell who had called her from the one side of the call Maura had heard. Jane, Maura knew, tended to ascribe ringtones to different contacts in her phone, but her phone had issued forth just now a series of beeps entirely unfamiliar in form to Maura; perhaps a jingle of some kind.

Had the call been from the dashing military hero Casey, ready to roll back in from Afghanistan with his now functioning legs and penis and sweep Jane off her feet again?

Maura let out a sigh and set down her scalpel for a moment. Thinking unfavourably of Casey was not generous or kindly. Not very in the nature of _philia._ Almost verging on… well, was it possible? Was she… _jealous_?

Maura picked up the scalpel. Her hand hovered. She set the instrument down again.

What a time to be distracted by her thoughts about her _eros _for Jane. _Sorry, Mr Doe. _Maura quietly, internally apologised to the corpse stretched out in front of her. She was usually so much more sympathetic to the deceased, but right now she was severely preoccupied.

Because it was, after all, a fact, that she passionately, romantically – in every kind of way – loved Jane. And it was also, of course, another, inconvertible fact, that Jane did not – never had, never could – feel the same way.

_Philia, _yes. _Eros_, no.

Jane was, in the end, and indeed even at the beginning, heterosexual. Apparently, entirely so, with not even the standard variation that might be expected to be present here in a successful female police officer (Maura pondered momentarily whether she was relying on statistical analysis or cliché in coming to this view, and decided it was both. Cliché of course only became cliché having been grounded in truth). Maura had not read Jane as straight, and exclusively so, on their first meeting (not counting the coffee shop dressed as a prostitute misunderstanding). Her instincts had failed her when she had been strongly of the view that Jane was likely to have some kind of interest in, or experience with, women. Maura had got it all wrong, she knew, when she had thought there had been some kind of frisson between them at that crime scene. Jane had been giving off signals, but to agent Gabriel Dean, with whom she had later had something of an unsatisfactory affair – unsatisfactory in Dean's constancy and honesty, not in the bedroom department, a topic that Jane preferred not to discuss at all. Maura had, that first day surveying the handiwork of Hoyt's apprentice, had upon meeting Jane properly for the first time a sudden warm sensation that reminded her of those initial stages in her previous romances with women – all of which had been brief and fleeting, but all of which she had quietly enjoyed, without ever feeling the need to say out loud the word "bisexual" about herself, which, come to think of it, had she been pressed, was a definition she would find it difficult to deny was probably factually accurate.

Labels aside, Jane had immediately attracted Maura's attention, and, Maura had to admit, attracted Maura herself, but their very agreeable friendship had snowballed rapidly, and Maura had pushed back to her mind any thoughts of anything else. Friends were hard to come by. Whilst not considering herself vastly experience, Maura would have to say she had had more lovers than friends, and Jane was so different to the women Maura had been with previously. The first, in fact – Maura had not told anyone this – the first person Maura had ever slept with, predating Garrett, had been a girl at boarding school - the daughter of the Serbian ambassador, who had taught Maura some Serbian, and much else besides. Then there had been a classmate at college – another medical student, a very serious girl who was unimaginably wild in bed, and now a thoracic surgeon in Seattle, married to a man and who sent, without fail, Christmas cards to Maura each year, signed from the entire family, including the dog. And finally a high-powered lawyer with an incredible body (_her abs weren't as hard as Jane's, _Maura thought, with an internal, wistful sigh) whose secretary had scheduled in their sexual appointments at one of the city's better hotels, who talked on the phone for nearly every minute of their rendez-vous not spend in bed, and who Maura had been half-afraid would eventually send her a hefty if professionally drafted invoice for the time spent pleasuring her. All of them were wealthy, well-educated professional women, all of them were gorgeous, and all of them were, to Maura, slightly boring. Maura couldn't imagine any of them, say, shooting themselves in order to save the day, as Jane had so heroically done not so long ago (_and Maura terrified that she would lose her forever. Thanking aloud a God for whom there was no real empirical evidence, when Jane survived)_, But then all of those women had been interested in Maura. And Jane so obviously wasn't.

As time had gone on, Maura had had to concede that her usually quite well-calibrated gaydar – or bidar – must have been malfunctioning the day she met Jane Rizzoli. Jane appeared to have no interest in women at all. After all, Maura could only deal with the facts. Jane continued to date men, and only men. Near the beginning of their friendship, on a case that had a lesbian angle, one in which Jane had even ended up posing as a lesbian and visiting a girlie bar (_oh, the fun Maura had had with her online profile, and imagining the message she would send in response to it…) _Maura had wondered aloud what kind of women they would like – if, course, they liked women. She had waited, almost holding her breath, to see if Jane would concede that of course she did in fact like girls, particularly blonde-haired and hazel-eyed chief medical examiners a few inches shorter than her, even when they were wearing expensive heels. Jane had instead made a joke out of the whole thing, and Maura had played along, and told herself to forget about the impossibly attractive Jane Rizzoli. The experiment had failed. Jane got together with Casey and seemed very preoccupied with him. Men, it appeared, were her thing,

It would be a bad idea anyway, what with them being colleagues, of course. And such good friends. And yet, still Jane was forever reaching out for Maura's hand (_Jane has strong, hard hands_), or her shoulder, or her waist, or – on one, very difficult to forget occasion – her posterior, an incident in which she had apparently unthinkingly applied a delicate pat to Maura's behind whilst dashing past. And Jane had more than once made a joke that Maura was not her type. Maura was no expert in flirting. Perhaps it was simple as it seemed – Maura wasn't her type. And yet she had read an interesting paper about laughter as a self-defence mechanism; broadly, sometimes people joked about the opposite of their real emotions to avoid saying what they really felt, and to minimise their true sentiment in the slightly ridiculous. Surely that could not be the case here.

"The things I do for you…" Jane had said, her look smouldering, already fully ready to help Maura with whatever it was Maura needed help with…

No. No to this, and all the other examples that Maura sometimes thought of alone in bed at night, or even, as now, in the middle of the day with a dead guy who needed a cause of death laid out right in front of her. Maura told herself she was just projecting her feelings onto Jane. There was no way that Jane could ever reciprocate.

Unbidden, a thought: _Jane hanging up that phone, bursting into the morgue, and kissing Maura, full on, right on her lips, no longer those pecks to her cheek or the top of her head but a real, passionate kiss… Jane dragging Maura upstairs to her desk, lifting Maura up and onto it, Maura wrapping her legs around Jane's… and then a reversal, perhaps Maura on her knees…_

An absurd thought. Series of thoughts. Especially as it was still the middle of the day and they were both being paid by one division of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or other to contribute meaningfully to a homicide investigation.

Jane's call was finally finished, it seemed. She stepped back into the morgue again. Maura wondered if she were blushing at the object of her affection having reappeared when she had just had such an intimate thought – but it didn't seem Jane was very likely to notice. She was now at near 100% - Janeness, apparently.

_"_I don't believe it!" Jane exclaimed, with venom, shaking her head, and putting away her phone. "_That son of a bitch!"_


End file.
